Barack Obama President Of Newspaper Endorsements

Good news, Barack Obama supporters: Your Democratic presidential nominee is winning the campaign for newspaper endorsements in a landslide, with 112 newspapers to rival John McCain's 39! By circulation it's 13 million to 4 million. Sadly, however, those endorsements are almost definitely useless.

Endorsements, you see, can have some impact in low-profile races, "when you're voting for Dog Commissioner, and you have no information about the candidates," as polling analyst Nate Silver put it. In a presidential campaign, voters have plenty of time to make up their own minds. That's why they didn't care when most newspaper editors endorsed John Kerry four years ago.

Still, endorsements give clues at to which way swing states might go, as they did in 2004, probably by reflecting prevailing conventional wisdom in those areas. And they're endlessly entertaining to media geeks. So enjoy the color-coded map of newspaper endorsements above, made by our intern Nicola using the latest data from Editor And Publisher. There's a larger version here.